One night filmmaker Jim Killeen was ego-surfing on the web and found at least 24 men who shared the same name with him.

Out of curiosity, he tracked down and contacted six of the other Jim Killeens only to realize that these people, though strangers from different countries, were actually quite similar. His experiences are available in a documentary titled Google Me (see trailer above).

Who is a Googleganger?

The act of searching your own name on Google is ego-surfing and if you come across people who share your name, they are called your googlegangers. In Jim’s case, he found that he had 24 googlegangers on the web.

Googleganger defines the act of searching your own, or someone else’s full name on Google, and finding someone completely different, but sharing the same name.

The term Googleganer has been around for a while (see Urban Dictionary) and earlier this week, the Macquarie Dictionary named ‘googleganger’ as the word of the year.

A simple name search on Facebook reveals that I probably have a few thousand Googlegangers online (the downside of having a common name) though I have met only one of them virtually. Have you found your Googleganger?